The banner is a low-tech simulation of my place through time: the first photograph is intended to invoke the tundra of the PaleoIndian period, 12,500-10,000 BCE; the second, the swamps and woodlands of c. 1630, of the contact period between the Massachusett and the first European settlers. The third photograph is of my front yard when I moved in (the yard was used as a doggie playground), c. 2007; the fourth, a photograph of my garden, c. 2010.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Compared to a lot of Americans, I have not lived in very many places. After going to college in my home town (Buffalo, NY), I left in order to go to graduate school (first Washington, DC, and then Chapel Hill, NC). I then moved to the Boston area to take my first academic job. I lived in the western suburbs of Belmont and Arlington, and then moved to Cambridge five years ago. I move in small increments: all three places, it turned out, were within three miles of each other. I was, and continue to be, very attached to Buffalo—Kenmore, really—but it wasn’t until moving to Cambridge that I discovered a deep connection to place, to a home, a nest—and to a garden. My love of my place—a condo on the first floor of a two-family condo near the Fresh Pond Reservoir, proximity to which is a major reason for my settled happiness here—has spilled over into my academic life, and my academic life has spilled over into my love of place.

One of the results of this mix is this blog, which I dedicate to discussing what I call “lost and invented ecologies.” I’ll get to the more scholarly aspects of this project in later posts, but in this initial post, I want to lay out the territory—the metaphors of place come easily to hand, I must say—and describe what I hope to accomplish.

Look at the banner that Shannon Garner-Balandrin, one of my graduate students, designed for me—and who also deserves credit for setting up this blog in the first place. The banner is a low-tech simulation of my place through time: the first photograph is intended to invoke the tundra of the PaleoIndian period, 12,500-10,000 BCE; the second, the swamps and woodlands of c. 1630, of the contact period between the Massachusett and the first European settlers. The third photograph is of my front yard when I moved in (the yard was used as a doggie playground), c. 2007; the fourth, a photograph of my garden, c. 2010. My place, then, is both a lost ecology—no more swamps and ponds and woods crisscrossed by hunting trails and paths to the water—and an ecology more recently invented by those first settlers (and later “Americans”) who shaped this land over four centuries by plotting out main roads and streets and directing where houses and driveways and trees and lawns would take their places. (The streets in my neighborhood make dead ends and take odd turns around what used to be water, then swamp, now subsidized housing. I’ll tell this story, too.)

Wherever humans have been and are, one sees double: lost because invented; invented because lost. Time itself is also responsible for lost ecologies, of course; in this instance, turning that tundra into something else, then into something else again. In this blog place, however, I will focus on human interventions into the ecosystem—and I am mindful that the word intervention suggests that humans are somehow not part of a given ecosystem, which is not true, really. This is another story that many are telling, and that I hope to add to.

Invented also includes the sense of imagined, and thus I also hope to tell stories of imagined, created places and worlds—not cities or other built spaces, but landscapes and ecosystems, sometimes described in great detail, sometimes simply gestured at: Tolkien’s Middle Earth, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, Dr. Seuss’ landscapes of Trufula Trees, Atlantis, Avalon, the Earthly Paradise, heaven (lost?), hell, and many more invented places.

The next set of posts will be written by a group of guest bloggers: several of my undergraduate students. I am finishing a seminar in which the focus was my research on lost and invented ecologies, and I invited them to make their own brief forays into lost and invented places. Most of them were interested in imaginary places, and I learned a great deal from them.

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I am a professor of medieval literature at Northeastern University in Boston, and am a passionate gardener, kayaker, and fortunate companion to Nirvana the tuxedo cat and Otis the cairn terrier. In addition to my academic project on lost and invented ecologies (a study of medieval literary texts, maps, and other documents as witnesses to natural places that no longer exist or have changed dramatically), as well as more casual investigations into lost and invented places, I am finishing the first novel in a trilogy that I like to describe as post-cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, ecotopic, and polymorphously perverse sci-fi.